In this search for genius all souls shall be tried. Education must be universal and compulsory; children belong not to parents but to the state and to the future.[28] And education cannot begin too early. Cleinias, asking whether education should begin at birth, is astonished to be answered, “No, before”; and if Plato could have his way, no doubt there would be a realization of Dr. Holmes’ suggestion that a man’s education should begin two thousand years before he is born. The chief concern at the outset will be to develop the body, and not to fill the soul with letters; let the child be taught his letters at ten, but not before.[29] Music will share with gymnastics the task of rounded development. The boy who tells his teacher that the athletic field is as important and necessary a part of education as the lecture-room is right. “How shall we find a gentle nature which has also great courage?”[30] Music mixed with athletics will do it. “I am quite aware that your mere athlete becomes too much of a savage, and that the musician is melted and softened beyond what is good for him.”[31] There is a determination here that even the genius shall be healthy; Plato will not tolerate the notion that to be a genius one needs to be sick: let the genius have his say, but let him, too, be reminded that he is no disembodied spirit. And let art take care lest its vaunted purgation be a purgation of our strength and manhood; poetry and soft music may make men slaves. No man shall bother with music after the age of sixteen.[32]
At twenty a general test will weed out those who give indication that further educative labor will be wasted on them; the others will go on for another decade, and a second test will eliminate those who will in the meantime have reached the limit of their capacities for development. The final survivors will then—and not before—be introduced to philosophy. “They must not be allowed to taste the dear delight too early; that is a thing especially to be avoided; for young men, as you may have observed, when they first get the taste in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and refuting, like puppy-dogs that delight to tear and pull at all who come near them.... And when they have made many conquests and received defeats at the hands of many, they violently and speedily get into a way of not believing anything that they believed before, and hence not only they, but philosophy generally, have a bad name with the rest of the world.”[33]
Five happy years are given to the study of philosophy. Gradually, the student learns to see the universal behind the particular, to judge the part by relating it to the whole; the fragments of his experience fall into a harmonious philosophy of life. The sciences which he has learned are now united as a consistent application of intelligence to life; indeed, the faculty of uniting the sciences and focussing them on the central problems of life, is precisely the criterion of the true philosopher.[34] But involved in this is a certain practical quality, a sense for realities and limitations. One must study books—and men; one should read much, but live more. So Plato legislates that his new philosophers shall spend the years from thirty-five to fifty in the busy din of practical life; they must, in his immortal image, go back into the cave. The purpose of higher education is to detach us for a time from the life of action, but only so that we may later return to it with a better perspective. To be put for a goodly time upon one’s own resources, to butter one’s own bread for a while,—that is an almost indispensable prerequisite to greatness. Out of such a test men come with the scars of many wounds; but to those who are not fools every scar is the mark of a lesson learned.
And now here are our philosophers, ripe and fifty, hardened by the tests of learning and of life. What shall we do with them? Put them away in a lecture-room and pay no further attention to them? Give them, as their life-work, the problem of finding how Spinoza deduces, or fails to deduce, the Many from the One? Have them fill learned esoteric journals with unintelligible jargon about the finite and the infinite, or space and time, or the immateriality of roast beef? No, says Plato; let them govern the state.
Did Plato mean it? Was he so enraged at the state-murder of the most beloved of philosophers that he forearmed himself against such a contretemps in his Utopia by making the philosophers supreme?—Was it only his magnificent journalistic revenge? Was it merely his reaction to the observed cramping and mediocritization of superior intellects in a democracy? Was it but Plato’s dramatic way of emphasizing the Socratic plea for intelligence as the basis of morals and social life? Perhaps all this; but much more. It was his sober judgment; it was the influence of the Egyptian priesthood and the Pythagorean brotherhood coming to the surface in him; it was the long-accumulated deposit of the stream of his personal experience.
We have to remember here that by philosopher Plato does not mean Immanuel Kant. He means a living being, a man like Seneca or Francis Bacon, a man in whom knowledge is fused with action, and keen perception joins with steady hand; a man who has had not only the teaching of books but the discipline of hard experience; a man who has learned with equal readiness to obey and to command; a man whose thought is coördinated by application to the vital problems of human society. “Inasmuch as philosophers alone are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable, and those who wander in the region of the many and variable are not philosophers, I must ask you which of the two kinds should be rulers of our state?”[35] Well, then, “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, ... cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race.”[36]
That, of course, is the heart and soul of Plato.
IV
Dishonest Democracy
LET us get back to the circumference and approach this same point by another route.
I grant you, says Plato, that to have rulers at all is very disagreeable. And indeed we should not need to have them were it not for a regrettable but real porcine element in us. My own Utopia is not an aristocracy nor a democracy, nor any kind of an ’ocracy; it is what some of you would call an anarchist communism. I have described it very clearly in the second book of my Republic, but nobody cares to notice it, except to repeat my brother’s gibe about it.[37] But instead of this Utopia of mine being a “City of Pigs,” it is just because we are pigs that I had to give up painting this picture and turn to describing “not only a state, but a luxurious state.” I am still “of opinion that the true state, which may be said to be a healthy constitution, is the one which I have described,” and not the “inflamed constitution” to which I devoted the rest of my book, and which in my opinion is much more a “City of Pigs” than the other. It is because people want “to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and have dainties and dessert in the modern fashion, ... and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, and gold, and ivory, ... hunters and actors, ... musicians, players, dancers, ... tutors, ... servants ... nurses wet and dry, ... barbers, confectioners and cooks, ... and hosts of animals (if people are to eat animals), ... and physicians; ... then a slice of neighbor’s land ... and then war,”[38]—in short, it is because people are pigs that you must have soldiers and rulers and laws.